Shasa Courtney and Manfred De L Rey - the sons of Centaine de Thiry - were blood enemies from their first boyhood encounter. Caught up in the tumult of South Africa's history through two decades, they found themselves adversaries in a war of age-old savagery to sieze the sword of power in their land. Sweeping from the teeming goldfields of the Highveld to the secret citadels of Afrikaner power, from the clamouring stadiums of Hitler's Berlin Olympics to the raging air war over Abyssinia, this is a rich, thrilling adventure, an epic saga of rivalry and revenge, of winners and losers in a struggle where only the ruthless survive.